This award supports Professor John E. R. Staddon of Duke University to collaborate in behavioral research with Professor Juan D. Delius of the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Konstanz, Federal Republic of Germany. They are interested in the "transitive inference" paradigm, a form of serial learning task in which subjects are given information about the relative values of stimuli presented in pairs, and then asked to infer the relation between novel pairs. In their research, they plan to investigate the mechanisms used by several different species to solve this task. They are considering a number of theories ("associative linkage", "rule stack", and "inference engine") that could account for successful solution of the serial learning problem. In addition, Dr. Staddon has developed a novel theory ("value transfer") that seems capable of describing many of the experimental results in Dr. Delius' laboratory, as well as others in the literature. They will collaborate in a set of new experiments designed to compare the four theories, then focus further experimental effort on the details of the most successful theory. Dr. Staddon has an outstanding reputation for formulating and experimentally testing formal models that explain complex adaptive behaviors of animals in terms of simple rules. His contributions to the collaborative research will be theoretical expertise, experimental design and some experimen- tal work. Dr. Delius is internationally recognized for his studies of comparative cognition. His laboratory and research team are excellently equipped to train pigeons in complex tasks in ecologically valid environments. Most of the experimental work will be carried out there. Recent research by these investigators and others suggests that animals are able to solve tasks traditionally held to require deductive logic. These results raise important questions about the phylogenetic distribution of reasoning and its underlying mechanisms. Drs. Staddon and Delius do not assume that success in serial learning tasks is positive proof of an ability to reason logically using cognitive representations. Instead, they propose to examine four different mechanisms that could account for success in the transitive inference task without recourse to symbolic reasoning.
